Daddy had been right about that. In that one thing, he was absolutely correct. It was her job; it was the job she had taken on herself. It was the job she had assumed in that crowded Christmastime department store a thousand years ago. And it was her weakness, too; it was the way they had seduced her. She thought about Baby, the doll this deadly man had given her. Your firstborn son. It was the weakness they had used to trap her, dangling images of Michael down the dim fortress corridors of the Novus Ordo. But maybe it was not only a weakness.
Maybe it was a kind of strength.
She looked at the Gray Man. He was moving toward Michael and Michael had raised a hand, but something passed between the two of them and Michael opened his eyes wide in shock. She could not see the mask Walker had adopted; it was a private and particular magic. But she sensed the change in Michael, his sudden weakness. She saw it in Walker’s wide, eager smile.
She thought, You will not have him.
Maybe she said it out loud, because Walker did a curious half-turn; his trajectory slowed; he was still moving toward Michael but he was looking at Karen now.
And it was a strange look there in his eyes, she thought; not the dull-witted deadliness she had expected but something spontaneous; something older and deeper. A mingling of surprise and curiosity, an appraisaclass="underline" What do you have for me?
As if she were bearing a gift.
Michael shook his head, as if some brief spell had been broken. Without thinking, Karen took two quick steps forward and reached to embrace Walker—to slow him down, at least.
You don’t believe I can do this. Oh, but I can.
It was an instinct too sure and swift for words. She simply reached for Walker the way Walker had reached for Michael… reached out and took hold of him in a way she could not define.
But it was a real embrace, too. She could smell him. He smelled cold, like this alley. It was an alley smell, vacant and dark, like oil slicks and old masonry and abandoned buildings on deep winter nights. She had the sudden, curious sensation that he was entirely hollow—that if she squeezed hard enough he would crumble in her hands.
She saw Michael step away until his shirt collar brushed the wall. He shook his head, dazed.
And Karen felt the Gray Man tremble… summoning his energy now, redirecting it.
She closed her eyes.
She was aware at once of what Michael called the doors and angles of the world … an unfolding of possibility that was here and not-here, both, and how she might move in it. And she felt the chaotic places, too, the uncreated worlds and the dead, entropic ones.
Walker closed his own arms around her. It was a true embrace now, a mutual embrace.
She heard Michael’s voice, faintly:
“Mom?” he said.
She understood what Walker meant to do… and what she must do to Walker.
She pulled back until only their hands were touching, a hot electricity running between them. Walker began a smile. She felt the withering force of his contempt.
And thought, I know those places too.
She said, “You will not have him.”
His hesitation was momentary.
She looked deep into his empty gray eyes.
A gentle push, she thought, and this opening… a hole in the world directly behind him, and the rush and hiss of churning chaos.
She felt the coldness of it, colder even than this winter alley.
She thrust forward and into him with all her weight. He tumbled backward… and the vision of him was as sharply etched as a dream: of the Gray Man, of Walker—her broken uncle—falling away out of time altogether; and of the final expression on his face… not astonishment or fear but something Karen perceived, in this weightless moment, as gratitude … as if she had given him a gift, or returned to him some stolen and immensely valuable possession.
She blinked and gasped, falling after him.
Oh, the coldness! Chaos and wild entropy and a random dead nothingness: this was the hole she had opened for him, and she could not stop herself tumbling after—
But there were hands on her, warm hands suddenly pulling her back… and the door winked closed… and then there was merely this alley, this particular winter night, this ashen moon, and Michael and Laura weeping with her.
Chapter Twenty-seven
1
Cardinal Palestrina boarded the Spanish diesel ship Estrella Vespertina, bound for Genoa with a cargo of jute and raw cotton and a handful of commercial passengers, on a fading late-winter day. The sky was cold and overcast, but he stood at the stern of the huge ironclad vessel and watched the harbor of Philadelphia draw away, wondering what consequences the events he had seen might imply.
For himself, nothing untoward. He had done his job as faithfully as it needed to be done, and in the end events had gone beyond him. Having proven his utility to the Curia, he might be allowed to carry on with his scholarly work. Assuming, Cardinal Palestrina thought, the war allows us such luxuries.
Ah, the war. But the news at the moment was not all bad. The Persian fleet had been turned back at the Balearics; the Turkish beachhead was isolated at Sardinia. European airpower would hold the day—for now.
So perhaps the loss of Neumann’s secret weapon was not as tragic as it seemed. The shaky alliance between Rome and the Novus Ordo would hardly be strengthened by this miscarriage… but it was a temporary alliance in any case, doomed by its internal contradictions. Cardinal Palestrina doubted that the fate of Europe had been sealed.
As for what truly had been lost—
Well, that could only be speculation.
Night had fallen before they were out of sight of the New World. The purser approached Palestrina and instructed him, in mincing English, to go below—“It will only get colder, Your Eminence!” But Palestrina shook his head. “I’ll be down shortly. Don’t worry. I won’t let myself die up here. I understand how awkward that would be.”
And the purser smiled nervously and moved away.
There were the ship lights and the distant lights of land, the continent like some far-off world, the way Neumann’s Other Worlds must have seemed, Palestrina thought, twinkling lights across an unimaginable gulf… and the thought made him sad, suffused him with an unwelcome melancholy. He allowed himself to wonder what might have been the outcome if this Plenum Project had not been solely aimed at creating a weapon; what wonders or terrors they might have found in that infinity, those Many Mansions. And he thought again of the land he had dreamed about, a world where Man had never fallen from grace, where it was warm, where the Garden grew, and there was innocence, and no one like Neumann, no serpent with his sweet poisonous fruit, and no death. We might have found it, Palestrina thought, touched it, walked in it— God help us, if only for a moment—
But the Estrella Vespertina sailed relentlessly eastward, and the distant lights sank below the horizon, and Cardinal Palestrina squeezed his eyes shut and went belowdecks, where the jute merchants sat drinking retsina and playing cards across a wooden table, and looked up at him unhappily, as if his sobriety would ruin their game, as if he reminded them of old sins.
2
Laura said, “What if I told you I was going away?”
Emmett, who had almost fallen asleep, turned up on his elbow and blinked. Behind him, moonlight streamed through a veil of bamboo blinds; the ocean rushed and sighed.
He tucked the sheet around her shoulders to protect her from the night. “I would remind you that you just got back.”